Culture

There is an important article in this week’s New Statesman. It addresses the big (embarrassingly big) issue of what our most fundamental values are in the West. The historian Tom Holland explains that his study of the classical world has made him realise that a huge gulf exists between the values of that era and modern Western assumptions – especially the assumption that all human lives matter. Classical culture has huge allure for modern intellectuals, but in reality its values were never far from fascist. And it was Christianity that put new values on the table – a fact that Enlightenment thinkers massively downplayed, due to their sneering dismissal of ‘superstition’.

There are two articles in yesterday's Guardian that are critical of something called ‘liberalism’. Giles Fraser vents his irritation at an advertisement for a hotel chain, aimed the global business elite. It celebrates the idea of the individual’s freedom from boundaries, constraints – be a ‘beautiful nomad’ it urges. This epitomises the worst sort of ‘liberalism’, he says. And Martin Kettle suggests that we are seeing the demise, or at least the failure, of the two versions of liberalism that have dominated national life for decades: the social liberalism of the 60s and economic liberalism of the 80s. Brexit was in part a protest against both, he says.

Here is one of those stories that matters even though it preoccupies the Guardian.  Last week the celebrated novelist Lionel Shriver gave an address at the Brisbane book festival.  It was heralded as being about ‘community and belonging’ but ended up being about ‘fiction and identity politics’.  In particular Shriver (the author, most famously, of We Need to Talk About Kevin) addressed the issue of ‘cultural appropriation’.  As well as being a condemnatory term for wearing a sombrero or eating Thai food, this is also the current term for ‘making things up’ and ‘using your imagination’.  Surely this is something novelists ought to do, you ask? Apparently not.

Can you imagine, in the wake of a terror attack in London, a tabloid, or any other kind of media outlet, publishing a photograph of a naked and distressed child caught up in the melee? It isn’t hard to answer the question. Of course they wouldn’t publish it. It would break every rule in the book. It is bizarre, then, to see Facebook accused of censorship for coming to exactly the same conclusion: that it wasn’t right to carry an image of naked and distressed child. It is even weirder to see Facebook attacked from a corner – the Guardian – which would normally be among the first to damn tabloid intrusion. The difference is that the photograph in question was not taken in London and was not taken in the recent past.

You know you’re getting old not when the policemen start looking young, but when a public figure dies and you say ‘O, I thought they were dead already!’ So it was for me when I heard that the Australian writer Richard Neville had died of dementia at the age of seventy four last week. Neville was never any sort of hero of mine - I was too busy promising my soul to Satan for a quick lick of Marc Bolan. But when I was thirteen and at the peak of my shoplifting prowess, I nicked his book Play Power on exactly the same robbing rampage that saw me take proud possession of The Female Eunuch, the half-mad masterpiece of Neville’s contrary contemporary Germaine Greer.

'You’ve got to stop eating those croissants,' my parents tell me. I know they’re right, but have they seen the croissants? As crisp as a Hilton bed sheet and golden like the sun. They caution that they’re a waste of money, and I get it. In the early stages of my addiction I forked out £1.50 apiece; then the coffee shop grew hungry for more. £1.75 they demanded. That’s £8.75 a working week. Think of a month’s worth. (You do the maths - because I can’t). I try not to think about the cost. I stuff the pastry into my mouth and close my eyes, the pain crumbling away. Just like all the things I spend money on. I purchase stuff I don’t need all the time.

London’s nightlife is under attack. That became obvious this morning with the news that the popular club Fabric has closed for good. After a series of drug-related deaths at the venue, Islington Borough Council has decided the risk of keeping it open is too great. It’s come as a shock to many that Fabric is finished. Indeed, a petition to keep it alive reached over 148,000 signatures - and many celebrity backers, such as Annie Mac and the Chemical Brothers pleaded with the public: save the rave. But it was too little, too late. Another London nightclub has been forced to close. Fabric is just a small part of a much bigger problem; our party scene is in crisis, with clubs in the city declining by a third between 2005 and 2015.

For about a year now, James Delingpole and I have been doing a regular podcast for Ricochet, the American website dedicated to conservative news and commentary. It’s called 'London Calling' and you can hear the latest one here. Among the many topics covered on this episode are the French burkini ban, Robert Tombs’s 'The English and Their History', my appearance on Any Questions last week and James’s appearance this week (alongside Diane Abbott). We also talk about the West London Free School and what we did on our holidays.

For football fans, today is a special day: it's Transfer Deadline Day – a branded, almost to Hallmark levels, moniker. It's a day of bathos and unfulfilment. Your club will miss out on a top target, sign some underwhelming alternative, and clog up social media with pictures of them holding a shirt in a car park. Transfer Deadline Day is the great dance of performative capitalism for the working classes. We call it a ‘window’ because it is supposed to be a ‘window of opportunity’ for clubs and fans, but there is also a voyeuristic element. We spend the summer hidden in the bushes, watching the attractive Athletico Madrid winger or Bayer Leverkusen centre-half preening in front of the mirror.

I was in the Netherlands over the weekend, which is always nice; it's a bit like England, but just better. I've always wanted my country to be a bit more like our neighbours, especially Germany and Holland, and that includes standardisation with European norms when they clearly make more sense. Driving on the left, for example, when the entire continent drives on the right, is just annoying, and must make our cars more expensive and cost a handful of lives each year. And if you don't have anyone in a passenger seat you have to get out whenever dealing with any sort of parking or toll machine; as I get older this is one of those things that just get more annoying, like having to tie shoelaces.

An almost worldwide survey on penis length — the sort of thing I always read with a sense of trepidation and inadequacy — suggested that the countries boasting the largest of these flawed and devious appendages are all located in Africa. Especially West Africa, from the DRC down to the humid and still pristine jungles of Gabon. This suggests to me one of two things — either that the old racist cliché is absolutely true, or that Africans tell bigger lies than anyone else on the planet. Either or both of these explanations are likely to get me into trouble, so I suppose I’d better stop digging. Thing is, I can’t fathom another answer.

Congratulations to all those free schools who got their GCSE results this morning. We don’t yet have the full picture, but early reports are good. Top marks to Tauheedul Islam Boys' High School in Blackburn, a free school that opened in 2012. Ninety-five per cent of its pupils achieved five A* to C grades in their GCSEs, including English and maths, a metric known as '5A*–CEM'. To put this in context, last year’s 5A*–CEM national average was 56.1 per cent. Another school that has done well is Dixons Kings Academy in Bradford. It was one of the first 24 free schools to open in 2011 – it was originally called King Science Academy – and was taken over by the Dixons Academy chain after financial irregularities were brought to light by a whistleblower.